In recent years, air conditioning devices including heaters and refrigerated air conditioners have become more advanced and widespread. As the residential areas where air conditioners are used grow, the importance of a total heat exchanger for an air conditioner, which can recover the temperature and humidity during ventilation, is increasing. The total heat exchanger as described above has a heat exchange element incorporated therein as an element component that exchanges heat. This heat exchange element can exchange latent heat and sensible heat simultaneously without mixing fresh outside air drawn from the outdoors to indoors during the use of an air conditioner with contaminated air to be discharged from the indoors to outdoors. The heat exchange element is required to have a high total heat exchange rate. Further, in order to reduce power consumption of an air blowing device (such as a fan or a blower) that circulates an air flow for ventilation, and to suppress the operating sound of the total heat exchanger to a low level, the heat exchange element is required to have a low air-flow resistance when each air flow circulates.
A conventional heat exchange element employs a structure in which partition members having gas-sealing properties, heat-transfer properties, and moisture permeability are stacked in multiple layers with a predetermined spacing, where each of the partition members is sandwiched between spacing members having a wave shape in cross section. In an example of the conventional heat exchange element, the partition member is a square flat plate, the spacing member is a wave-shaped plate formed into a triangular wave shape in cross section, and the partition members are stacked with a spacing member sandwiched therebetween in such a manner that the wave-shape direction of the alternate spacing members is turned by 90 degrees. Therefore, fluid passages in two directions, through which a primary air flow and a secondary air flow pass, are formed every two layers (Patent Literature 1). In another example of the conventional heat exchange element, a resin molded product is used as a spacing member instead of a wave-shaped plate, and a partition member and the resin molded product are integrally molded, thereby increasing the degree of flexibility in shape of the heat exchange element, improving the total heat exchange efficiency, and reducing pressure loss (Patent Literature 2).